The best time for developers to optimize their code is while they are writing it. Developers can leverage the detailed transaction tracing available from APM type tools, like Prefix, as a fast feedback loop to understand what their code is doing and how long it takes. Prefix works as an ASP.NET profiler and also works with several common JVMs for …

Developers love tools, and they tend to use a lot of them. Many of them are such a normal part of our daily lives and toolchain that we don’t even think of them as tools anymore. Your computer, the Internet, a simple text editor, and source code repositories are a good example of this. They are just fundamental things we …

I’ve used a number of Java open source libraries over the years in a variety of projects. Java developers are lucky to have a long list of community libraries to pull from. Here are a few standouts that have made their way into virtually all of my new development. These were chosen because they have clean interfaces, provide significant value, …

Of all the modern development practices which I use day to day, none other has been more beneficial to me than the introduction of quick feedback loops in my workflow. Although a concept made popular by the Agile methodology and practices, it’s something most of us deal with when we invoke the compiler (or linter) which tells us if our …

It is hard for developers to imagine troubleshooting applications problems without debug logging. When all else fails and you can’t figure out what your code is doing, our answer is to always add more logging. But unfortunately, log files can a spaghetti style mess thanks to lots of web requests happening at a single time. Prefix can organize your logging …

Prefix is a lightweight profiler for .NET and Java developers. It enables developers to easily see what their code is doing. Including SQL queries, HTTP calls, errors, logs, and much more. Because it is a profiler, it can also be customized to track any method in your code or third party libraries! In this article we explore why that is useful …

Prefix enables developers to easily see what their code is doing as they write and test their code, including SQL queries, HTTP calls, errors, logs, and much more. Prefix is most often used with web applications, but .NET Windows Services are also supported. This article discusses how to use Prefix with a Windows Service or console application. Learn more about …

Prefix enables developers to easily see what their code is doing as they write and test their code, including SQL queries, HTTP calls, errors, logs, and much more. One of the best features of Prefix is its ability to see all of the exceptions that are occurring in your code. There are 3 types of exceptions: Unhandled – the user got a …

Prefix enables developers to easily see what their code is doing as they write and test their code. Including SQL queries, HTTP calls, errors, logs, and much more. This makes Prefix really handy for viewing SQL queries your code is using. Prefix is free! Learn more about Prefix After installing Prefix, it will automatically track all SQL calls. No code changes are needed, …

Prefix enables to developers to easily see what their code is doing. Including SQL calls, errors, logs, and much more. One of the key features is tracking remote HTTP calls to know if they worked, how long they took, etc. Viewing what the code did on a remote server takes it one step further to simplify the daily life of …

Every business is highly dependent on software these days. Ensuring that all of your organization’s mission-critical applications are running optimally at all times is priority #1! There is a wide range of application performance management and application monitoring tools on the market available for developers, DevOps teams, and traditional IT operations. There is a lot of gray area as to …

In the process of testing Retrace with .NET Core I decided to use the example MusicStore app as a test application. Pulling down the source from GitHub and deploying it to Azure App Services is easy right? Correct, and totally wrong both as it turns out. After hours of headaches… I figured I needed to share how I finally solved my …

I’ve been working with Terraform this week to help setup an Elasticsearch cluster on Azure. Terraform provides an agnostic (somewhat) means of defining infrastructure components locally and for cloud deployments (Azure, AWS, Google, etc. [https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/index.html]). Its pretty simple to get going; download and update your path: https://www.terraform.io/intro/getting-started/install.html. Create a directory and drop in a sample.tf file wth a a virtual …

In issue v1.2 of our BuildBetter eMag, we chatted with some of our favorite developers about their favorite tools. We found out that Richard Campbell of .NET Rocks! loves WebPageTest.org, and the head of the LinkedIn .NET User Group—Brian Madsen—loves CodeIt.Right. Of course we got a lot of great insights (and you should totally download the eMag and check it …

For those of you do do not know a lot about Stackify, we do a lot of things around application performance and have actually written a couple profilers ourselves. We know a lot about code profiling for .NET ans Java. Today I want to talk about the three different types of profilers and describe the differences between them and talk …

This month we’ve been talking a lot about tools we use for different phases of development. We even wrote a whole eMagazine dedicated to tools and interviewed six power devs to find out what they’re using to build better applications. Download that here if you haven’t. While tools for writing, troubleshooting and monitoring are critically important, we don’t spend …

I first started programming when I was about 13. I started out writing scripts to play old text based D&D games on bulletin boards while I was sleeping and at school. After school I went to DeVry and have been programming with Microsoft tools for about 15 years. My first real job was writing programs to automatically buy concert tickets …

It’s no secret that we’re a bit obsessed with tools around here. We’re constantly challenging ourselves to build the tools that .NET Developers can’t live without. So, when it came time to plan the August/September issue of BuildBeter eMagazine, we wondered, “what do some of the community’s best developers have in their toolbox?” We reached out to a handful of …